How was your gig last night?

[Bluewine]

3 hours ago, hiram.k.hackenbacker said:

And you took it? 

There's more to the story which is why I had no problem taking the money.

Blue

[Woodinblack]

We had a gig a bit like that. A friend of 2 people in the band wanted a free gig, they said yes, and I said no, wasn’t doing a free gig for someone I didn’t know, was an awkward feeling for a while that I didn’t appreciate  but not changing my mind on that. In the end me and the guitarist got paid, the others didn’t. 

The upshot was a clear “don’t ask this again”

[yorks5stringer]

Played The Cider Barn at Draycott last night, not many in for 3 acts as it was so hot and people were away. Only the second time I have used my Chowny Hollow Body and the guitarist had not seen it before.. he asked what it was like for feedback, I replied most who had seen and heard it thought it was very nice😉

Edited April 21, 2019 by yorks5stringer

[MacDaddy]

Enjoyment of last night's gig was somewhat marred, by Timothy Taylor's Boltmaker no longer being a guest ale.

[Graham]

Last night was pretty good, but not as busy as I was hoping - I think the hot weather and that there's two big events in Eastbourne tonight meant some folk stayed away.

Instead of driving home at 3am, the singer and his wife got themselves a hotel for the night, so he had a few drinks - he kept it together, but was definitely more lubricated than usual by the end of the night.

Venue manager was disapointed we're not back there until the autumn which always a good sign, but that's because they'd double booked us on half our dates, so can't do much about that.

[dontregartha]

An interesting two nights.

First night played a Northampton town centre pub that was on my hitlist for a cull as its a miserable load in and the past two times, been pretty empty.
One of the singers ( he has a cool AllenHeath rack mount rack mount desk with remote mixing via ipad) anyway instead of turning up early he fetches with just an hour to go.
We're all wired in and ready to go and we then have an hour of fannying around - ringing out the mikes - at 8.30pm with a full pub, not great ad for a band. He's trying to mix the whole thing up so its as loud as f...   In the end he can't hear himself and ends up shouting. The gig was good in spite of this and the bar was unusually busy. Happy bar manager.

Next day singer calls in sick "my voice is screwed and I won't make it tonight" Our other singers (we go out with two) are either booked out or away. So i spend the rest of the day trying to find help, but on Easter weekend that's a non starter.

I have never cancelled a gig in over 45 years - (I played with a busted finger after trapping it in a car door once and dragged myself out of bed during a bout of flu ) so I wasn't going to cancel now.

In the end I said I would sing (not easy when playing disco/funk) but in the event the other singer stepped up and saved the day.

Good gig, happy landlord, but some staffing issues to be addressed over the next couple of days.

[Graham]

I forgot to say, we played All My Life by the Foos at the end of the set last night, during which I do heavy backing vocals on the DONE DONE, ONTO THE NEXT ONE at the end, as we finished my legs stopped working, they just about went from under me.

I just about stopped myself from falling over, I guess I must've pushed all the oxygen out of my body 😳

[lurksalot]

3 hours ago, MacDaddy said:

Enjoyment of last night's gig was somewhat marred, by Timothy Taylor's Boltmaker no longer being a guest ale.

In a fortunate turn of events , my most enjoyed band of yesterday’s Nantwich jazz, blues and music festival, was in fact refreshed by a few scoops of said Boltmaker ! 

[kusee pee]

We decided to play a number of songs we hadn't gigged for years last night. I was a little dubious at first and a bit worried that they wouldn't come back to me but it turns out they totally rejuvenated the playing live vibe.  We've been getting a little stale recently so now have decided to get our older songs back on rotation so no two gigs are the same.  It's genuinely enthused me and I'd forgotten how much I enjoy playing a big variety of styles. Looking forward to the rest of the year with renewed enthusiasm knowing that RATM could follow James Blunt who could follow Chic with some Simple Minds to conclude 😁

[dmccombe7]

23 minutes ago, kusee pee said:

We decided to play a number of songs we hadn't gigged for years last night. I was a little dubious at first and a bit worried that they wouldn't come back to me but it turns out they totally rejuvenated the playing live vibe.  We've been getting a little stale recently so now have decided to get our older songs back on rotation so no two gigs are the same.  It's genuinely enthused me and I'd forgotten how much I enjoy playing a big variety of styles. Looking forward to the rest of the year with renewed enthusiasm knowing that RATM could follow James Blunt who could follow Chic with some Simple Minds to conclude 😁

Good advice to rotate the set list rather than let it go stagnant. 👍

Edited April 21, 2019 by dmccombe7

[Oopsdabassist]

4 hours ago, dontregartha said:

In the end I said I would sing (not easy when playing disco/funk) but in the event the other singer stepped up and saved the day.

 

I'd say you dodged a bullet there Don, I've heard you sing at one of Lester's bashes...you are just like me!!!

[jazzmanb]

3rd gig of weekend yesterday 

4pm ,what is usually the smallest bar we play turned into the lovely garden area out the back 

Our lovely rig will have been reverberating around the Durham hills and valleys 

[Graham]

The venue put up some photos from Saturday

 

Edited April 22, 2019 by Graham

[cheddatom]

I played the Brudenell in Leeds on Thursday, The Rigger in Newcastle-under-Lyme on Friday, and The Maze in Nottingham on Saturday. All three gigs were with Steve Ignorant's Slice Of Life who are absolutely awesome. I'm sure it's the only time I've seen a band without a drummer and still got that feeling I get when the music is "heavy". Interrobang were on these dates too. They're quite cool. I'm still undecided if I like the music but they're nice people and good players. The first two nights were awesome, really packed venues, great sound, great atmosphere etc. Saturday I'd been in the studio all day long and not had chance to eat. As soon as I got to Nottingham I went to the closest place I could to find some food - a dodgy kebab shop of course. I'm not sure if the food was bad or (as others have suggested to me) it was some sort of blood sugar thing, but about an hour after I'd eaten I started to sweat buckets and went very faint. I had to be walked out of the venue and upstairs to the dressing room where I promptly threw up and then sat there for another 2 hours feeling awful, waiting to get on stage. When I finally got on there I was feeling a little better, and I played fine, but the sound was absolutely terrible, lots of feedback from a dodgy vocal channel. Lots of people had left the venue too, which was disappointing. Maybe we went on too late - 11:15 ish. Afterwards it was obvious that everyone left in the venue somehow knew I'd been sick and they all thought it was from booze, which was frustrating and embarrassing in equal measures. 

Sunday night I played with my heavy band CreepJoint at a local venue. We were supporting a great local band called Clay Lake. I'd have been at this gig to watch them anyway, but they asked us to support and it was brilliant! Only 6 songs so I could go full pelt on the drum kit and it felt good!!!

[Stub Mandrel]

27 minutes ago, cheddatom said:

dodgy kebab

Get that old 'dodgy kebab' alibi in first 😈

 

[Wilco]

Gig 2 & 3 for me over the last few days with the band I joined in January.

First one, end of meeting beer festival tent show at Newbury Racecourse on a bitterly cold evening a week ago Saturday.

Second one in the centre of Lambourn on Good Friday at the end of the stables open day. Only a week later yet the weather was glorious!

Both gigs went great & the crowds were suitably lively!!

Used all 4 of my basses across the two dates & used the TC head on both occasions (only as I was away from kit for a while each event) on top of the two Barefaced cabs. Into PA & subs at Newbury but standalone at Lambourn.

Everything worked superbly thankfully!

[Monkey Steve]

On 21/04/2019 at 08:35, mep said:

Some years ago our singer accepted a wedding gig for a friend of his and said we'd do it for free and a bar tab.  Myself and our drummer didn't know the couple.  We kept asking what we would be getting paid but the singer was a bit vague. The gig was one of the best we've had and the free booze went down well. Got a taxi home and picked up the kit the next day. I wil not do a gig for free unless I personally know the person or its for charity. A free bar is ok but I won't drink anything like my fee. When pressed the singer admitted he really meant that him and the guitarist would do it for free as the know the couple but didn't clarity that with them properly so we all did it for free.  This was later and after he paid myself and the drummer our fee out of his own pocket.  He has not made the same mistake again and we discuss wedding and party fees between us before offering our services. 

I think it depends a lot on both how it is set out at the beginning, and how the band members react.  Some people will happily play for no money as long as they're having fun, and others won't.  No right or wrong.  My bugbear is when people agree to play for nothing or just expenses, and then do nothing but complain about it afterwards.

One old band of mine did a wedding as a present to a mate of mine (not theirs).  I offered to pay the band the usual gig fee, and to a man they came back and told me that they wouldn't take a penny more than the cost of petrol.

On another occasion the same band did a "loss leader" for a mate of mine who was looking at getting into being a promoter - he knew I was in a couple of bands and asked if I could get them to play for a flat £50.  The fact that he sold every ticket in advance, but still lost a load of money showed what a terrible promoter he would have been.  For my other, non-punk band, it was understood to be a good opportunity to play a gig when we were just getting started, we'd probably only just about cover fuel, but it would be a packed crowd in central London for a new promoter who would then owe us a favour.  The split was £10 each, but I'd happily put mine back into the pot if that didn't cover the petrol for anybody.

Everybody understood, and the night itself was brilliant, but the lead guitarist from band #2 made a bit of an @rse of himself (long story) which as was standard he blamed on everybody else, and because the promoter was my mate, that made it all my fault.  Including the fact that his girlfriend, having bagsied a £5.00 ticket, somehow managed to pay £10.00 for it, on a night where half of our mates, having also bagsied a ticket, just walked in without paying (more proof that a career as a promoter did not beckon for the organiser).

Everybody agreed that they could cover their petrol with the tenner that they were getting, so my tenner was to go into the band's float and could pay for half the next practice.  But the guitarist demanded that he get the tenner, because it was unreasonable that he should be a tenner out of pocket when he was doing a favour for me, it wasn't his fault that his girlfriend had paid twice the going rate for a ticket and anyway nobody else's mates had paid to get in (not actually true, plenty did).

We gave him the money, but that pretty much cemented his reputation as being a massive, selfish c#nt, and was the start of the end for him in that band.

Edited April 23, 2019 by Monkey Steve

[Leonard Smalls]

We played a gig at the Legendary Percy's in Whitchurch, Shropshire last night supporting the even more legendary Linerunners.

Not only is it a great venue with all sorts of bands playing from all over world, but they offered me a cab to play through... So I thought "it'll be some piddley little thing, I'll bring my Markbass 2x10 to supplement it". Turns out it was a Mesa Diesel 2x15 - with the 2x10 on top of that and my rack of amps/compressors it was taller than me. Not only that, but with only an indicated 200W RMS on my Crown power amp it was so loud that both guitarist and drummer couldn't hear themselves! It was big and it was clever 

We were also very honoured to have in attendance Sir @lurksalot of this parish, his brother and a number of other chaps I hadn't seen since leaving school back in 1882. So I was doubly pleased that we only made minor boo-boos, and that the bass player from Linerunners (who got an excellent sound from his Ric going through my rig) likened us to Can. Though I'm not sure if that meant we were the sort of band that folks pretended to like but didn't really. Still, roll on Speakeasy in Hereford on 6th June and recording starting this Sunday.

Edited April 27, 2019 by Leonard Smalls

[Woodinblack]

First of a 3 gig weekend (the weekend before a 4 gig weekend 🤨)

Easy setup, and actually quite good as it wasn't as noisy as normal. Started, but something wasn't right and I couldn't get into it. When I put my IEMs on, I was playing my gretsch for the first time, and it sounded like it was out of tune with itself. Its really offputting, it was almost like it had a flanger on it or something (its passive).

The next song when I sung backing, I realised that my voicelive had been switched to a random preset that had autotune on it, and as my iems are the bass and my mic, my mic was autotuning the sound of the bass!

Having sorted that out it got a lot better. The cheap gretsch sounds brilliant and plays very well, apart from the switch which is pretty tragic (It originally didn't work with the back pickup, yesterday it stoppped working with the front - a lot of wiggling and it worked again). 

In the end we had a lot of shouts of encores, and people seemed happy. I broke down the lights and the pa and put everything back in bags while being told by another bandmember why it was good having 2 gigs on one day and it wasn't too much work 😡

[Lozz196]

Well it wasn’t- for them!

[Lozz196]

Well it wasn’t- for them!

[Woodinblack]

25 minutes ago, Lozz196 said:

Well it wasn’t- for them!

No, its me and the drummer when it comes to breaking down.

Some woman came up after the gig and asked where the signer was, I said, oh you won't find him here at the moment, we are packing up!

[bazzbass]

Headlining a 3 band show at a small club.

Took my new Elf amp and one 10" cab.

Set up on stage, plug my bass in, tune up, turn on amp, drummer counts in first song

Me"Umm my amp's fooked, I'm out"

Then I realise I forgot to plug the speaker cable into the cab, D"OH !

Halfway through our set, my amp goes quiet. Oh no, my new amp is truely fooked this time.

I notice the 1/4" speaker plug got pulled out of the Elf a bit, it's a very thick, stiff speaker cable.

Oh, and the real tragedy, the guitarist spills my nearly full beer..........onto my 2ft x 2ft patch of the stage too so I haveta stand in it.

Living the dream, yep

Hope tomorrow's gig goes better lol.

Edited April 27, 2019 by bazzbass

[lurksalot]

5 hours ago, Leonard Smalls said:

We played a gig at the Legendary Percy's in Whitchurch, Shropshire last night supporting the even more legendary Linerunners.

Not only is it a great venue with all sorts of bands playing from all over world, but they offered me a cab to play through... So I thought "it'll be some piddley little thing, I'll bring my Markbass 2x10 to supplement it". Turns out it was a Mesa Diesel 2x15 - with the 2x10 on top of that and my rack of amps/compressors it was taller than me. Not only that, but with only an indicated 200W RMS on my Crown power amp it was so loud that both guitarist and drummer couldn't hear themselves! It was big and it was clever 

We were also very honoured to have in attendance Sir @lurksalot of this parish, his brother and a number of other chaps I hadn't seen since leaving school back in 1882. So I was doubly pleased that we only made minor boo-boos, and that the bass player from Linerunners (who got an excellent sound from his Ric going through my rig) likened us to Can. Though I'm not sure if that meant we were the sort of band that folks pretended to like but didn't really. Still, roll on Speakeasy in Hereford on 6th June and recording starting this Sunday.

It was a great night , really enjoyed both bands and an excellent venue , full of character and characters 

it was great we could all come down and remember some of our first band experiences as well , but 1882 

[Leonard Smalls]

1 hour ago, lurksalot said:

but 1882 

Might have been earlier!